Technology History | Bell Labs Murray Hill — The Transistor Room, With a Departure Date

Two men got a sliver of germanium to amplify a signal here on 16 December 1947, and showed it to management a week later, on the twenty-third.

John Bardeen and Walter Brattain built that point-contact transistor. William Shockley, who ran the group, was not part of it, and worked out the junction transistor in the weeks that followed.

The photograph the world remembers, taken for the public announcement in mid-1948, shows all three with Shockley seated at the microscope. It was staged.

The building around them opened in 1942, a wartime laboratory on a hilltop, and it went on to be the most productive industrial research site in the world for about forty years.

Claude Shannon wrote information theory into existence at Bell Labs in 1948, giving us the bit. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie built Unix here around the summer of 1969, then C to write it in, and nearly every operating system you have ever used descends from that work.

Two famous discoveries usually attached to this address happened elsewhere. Karl Jansky found radio noise from the Milky Way at Holmdel, and Penzias and Wilson picked up the cosmic microwave background at Crawford Hill — Bell Labs had several New Jersey sites, and they are routinely collapsed into this one.

The campus is leaving. Nokia announced in December 2023 that Bell Labs would move to the HELIX complex in New Brunswick, ground was broken on the new tower in September 2025, and the relocation is scheduled for completion by the end of 2028.

About a thousand people will go with it. Nokia looked at twenty-five locations before choosing another New Jersey city.

Berkeley Heights Township, which has considered this campus part of its identity since 1942, has opened a public survey and visioning meetings on what should happen to the site — an unusually early start on a question most towns face only after the fences go up.

There is a reason to come now rather than later. The Technology Showcase in the main lobby is open to the public during weekday business hours for self-guided visits, which is close to unheard of for a working corporate research campus.

Larger groups are asked to arrange it in advance. Whether any of it survives the move to New Brunswick is unknown.

The mailing address is New Providence; the campus is known by the name of the Murray Hill section, and Berkeley Heights claims it too.

Sources: Nokia Bell Labs' own location page for the Technology Showcase and visiting arrangements; State of New Jersey and City of New Brunswick announcements, 2023 and 2025; Berkeley Heights Township's redevelopment engagement pages. Cover photo: Ckaack, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.